I realize this is a troll, and I shouldn't bother responding, but....
This is a common misinterpretation. I'm not saying I like *hanging around with kids*. I'm saying I like a lot of the same things as I did when I was a kid.
Personally, I don't particularly like being around kids (I neither have, nor want, children). but when I am around them, they tend to like me because I can still act like a kid, instead of being just another boring adult who completely ignores them.
I'm the type that goes out to a state park and spends half a day following birds around to see what kind of material they're making nests out of. It has nothing to do with children, other than it being the same curiosity about the world that I had as a child, the thing that so many people lose as they grow up.
As far as pretending, it helps. When I've been troubleshooting a SQL Server issue for three days, spending an hour daydreaming about something else helps me approach the problem from a fresh perspective.
Yeah, it's not a secret that child abuse is typically a family affair, but telling parents that their brother or cousin might be touching little Suzie in a bad place doesn't sell news stories. Creepy looking men driving around in vans does.
Little kids like me, mainly because I have a similar sense of curiosity. I'll happily spend an afternoon watching bugs, or pretending to fight monsters in the backyard. Imagination is a wonderful tool for boosting creativity. But unless the parents really trust you (family, long-time friends, close neighbors, etc) you have to act like a boring adult to avoid being seen as a perv. No smiling, acknowledge them and then ignore them, just like mommy and daddy do.
If you find a lost child, the only way to help without getting a nightstick in a bad place from a rent-a-cop is to (a) don't get within arm's reach and (b) immediately dump the kid off with the first *female* you can find. Screw finding an employee, you're better off finding some random lady and telling her "this little boy can't find his mommy". Any attempt at help beyond that will end badly.
I suspect it is a mix. A slightly different example:
Roaches. You always see the stereotype of the woman freaking out. Well, I live in Florida. Palmetto bugs are a way of life down here. I don't care if you're in a $50 million mansion, you're gonna see palmetto bugs at some point. And they run/fly *straight* at you (tall and thin person == tree == shelter in their eyes).
Down here, people don't really freak out. I know people who will run screaming from a bee, but show them a roach and they calmly pick up a newspaper and crush it.
I don't think we're hardwired for these kinds of fear. My suspicion is that it results either from some trauma early in life (little kid gets bitten by a spider), or the result of being "taught" to fear it by your parents ("Don't touch that, it will make you sick").
Okay, not all people using laptops in class are assholes.
I've had professors that would cover 100+ slides in a 50 minute class. I can't write fast enough to keep up, but I *can* type fast enough. I sat in the back so I didn't disturb anyone.
With a netbook, the noise is minimal. The keys are usually pretty quiet, and there is no fan noise.
I do recall one asshole, though. He sat two rows ahead of me, and had a laptop. He used to watch porn in class. I don't remember a single lecture =)
UCF (Univ. Central Florida) kinda supported Linux. I could use wifi access, see and print to network printers, etc. The caveat is that they don't "officially" support it, so I was on my own when it came to troubleshooting any problems. Overall, it wasn't bad, I didn't hit any major snags. The techs were a mixed bag. A few knew Linux pretty well, but there were quite a few "Hey, what OS is that?" questions when they'd see my XFCE desktop.
Web courses, however, were a nightmare. The "enterprise"-level app (which had to have been written in someone's basement) was heavily optimized for IE6/7, and it was damn near unusable in any other browser. Switching between pages in Firefox would occasionally throw a "You are already logged in" error, forcing me to close the browser and clear the session cookie to get back in. The file upload utility only worked half the time, the other half the file would upload straight to a black hole (my teachers didn't buy the "A black hole ate my homework" excuse until I showed them exactly what happens). Eventually I got tired of it and tossed an XP guest in VirtualBox on my laptop.
Doesn't surprise me too much. I'd never used a serial port (I'm 25) until my current job as a network admin and had to deal with some Sun servers with no vid cards (and a stuffed switch that wouldn't accept connections through the web console).
Hell, between the 6 machines in my home office and the 5 in my work office (not counting all the gear in the server room, of course), there is not a *single* serial port to be found. Unless you're managing "real" servers or networking gear, serial ports are seldom seen anymore.
When I was in high school (graduated '02), I took a whole slew of AP courses. Now, the AP exams to determine college credit were taken about a month before the year ended.
After the AP exams, teaching *stopped*. My AP Physics teacher brought in an N64 and we spent the rest of the semester playing Super Smash Brothers. My AP English 2 teacher spent the last month grading freshman papers (and reading aloud the really awful ones) while we sat around playing poker (he even joined us a few times). AP Comp Sci? We played UT on a server we'd secretly installed on one of the research lab machines (I happened to know that one of the domain admin passwords was 030997, so we could do pretty much anything we wanted).
I only had one AP class that did anything after the AP exam (AP Calc), and that just consisted of a review of the material already taught.
Once they did what was required for us to take the AP exam, there was no incentive to go any further.
If you read my initial post, you'll find that I NEVER claimed it wasn't normal or typical. All I said is that apologies are *social*, not *natural* in their origin (as you initially claimed).
I made NO statements about whether or not they are okay, appropriate or acceptable.
See, the thing you don't understand here, is that I *don't* say "I'm sorry" in that case. I've been to plenty of funerals, but never ONCE have I apologized to the widow/widower.
My natural reaction is to ASK how the person is handling it. "Are you alright?" "How are you holding up?", etc. I can comprehend the emotion, and I am concerned for how the person is doing, but I do NOT feel any compulsion to APOLOGIZE.
You can show empathy WITHOUT apologizing.
Do you understand that one can exhibit, understand and be empathetic without resorting to an apology? That perhaps there are OTHER ways of showing support?
I did some volunteer work at a county library years ago, and they had the capability to track user history (full checkout history spanning several years).
When I was in college, my uni had records of everything I checked out. I found this out when I couldn't remember the name of a book I'd checked out 4 years earlier, and the circ lady pulled up my history to get the name. I saw the screen, which had full details on everything (book, checkout/return dates, etc).
Sorry, but apologizing is about #10 on my list of priorities in your scenario. My first response is likely to be "Are you okay", followed by "How the hell did I survive a tidal wave from an asteroid impact by holding onto a wet railing?"
Concern for the welfare of your group is natural (survival). Apologizing for something that you had nothing to do with is a SOCIAL construct. You are *taught* that you should apologize, it is not ingrained in your base nature.
First, a brief trick from my school days. We had a professor who didn't even look at the source. He'd come by, you'd "run" the app, and he'd look at the output. I'd forgotten about an assignment, so right before class I ran the calculation we were supposed to be "solving" on my calculator, hard-coded a cout in the app to print the answer, and stuck a pause in there to make it look like it is working. One of only three people who passed the assignment.
------------
Now the real one:
This one happened the night before I was supposed to deliver a milestone build. Short development time, lots of work, we've all had 'em.
So I'm working on a function that is taking all of the inputs and generating a list of all combinations. I haven't slept in about 2 days, I'm wired on caffeine. The code I end up with (quickest to write) looks like this:
*Note, these are just placeholder variable names, the real source code used descriptive names, used the values to pull data out of classes, etc*
x = [1,2,3,4,5] y1 = [8,9,0] y2 = ['a', 'b', 'c'] y3 = ['w', 'x', 'y', 'z'] x = [[e, f, g, h] for e in x for f in y1 for g in y2 for h in y3]
Keep in mind that in the actual function, it would have gone up to y11, with all 11 being parsed in that one list comprehension.
It works great, very fast, but it is *completely* unreadable. The code is still there (with about a page worth of comments). That one line convinced me to never consume seven 2-liters of Mountain Dew in a day and try to program. I don't drink soda/tea/coffee very often. Hell, I probably could have written something better DRUNK.
Just my own experience, but I've never seen differences in battery life that are this extreme. Linux has always been worse, but never more than about 10% on the laptops I've used, with one exception.
The only time I've seen a huge difference is on an HP laptop that I currently use as an SVN/Trac/CUPS server. The machine has a BIOS bug that prevents me from using ACPI in Linux, and HP never released a patch to fix it. The only way to keep the machine stable in Linux is to boot "acpi=off, noapic, nolapic". With no real power management, it drains mighty fast, even with all the hardware that gets disabled booting this way (webcam, wireless, etc).
On the other hand, a few years ago I owned a wonderful Sager laptop. With two double capacity batteries and a regular capacity battery, I could get a full 20 hours of battery life from the three (8 hours for double, 4 for regular) running Linux (Gentoo at the time), which was within 1 hour of the average total when I ran XP.
Linux does have worse battery life, for a number of reasons, but the difference doesn't seem significant on most hardware. It all seems to depend on hardware quirks in your machine.
Last time I was out at the beach, I found a similar system had replaced our trusty meters in the public parking lots. The process for parking went something like this:
(1) Park (2) Walk to one of the pay stations (3) Insert credit card (4) Walk to another pay station after realizing the card reader is busted (5) Realize I don't know my space number (6) Cancel purchase and walk back to my car (7) Discover that the space number is printed on the ground underneath my car (kudos to the genius who came up with that) (8) Find an empty space halfway across the lot and count backward to my car (9) Go back to the second pay station, and wait in line behind the 6 people who magically arrived between steps 5 and 8 (10) Insert card, wait, enter space number, wait, select time, wait for ticket to print. (11) Walk back to my car again (always on the far end of the lot from the one working pay station) (12) Put the ticket on the dash of my car (13) Walk to the beach, passing by the pay station I was just at
They take forever, are more prone to breaking (a meter breaks, one spot is affected...a pay station breaks, the whole lot is affected), and provide ample opportunities to screw up the purchase.
This is supposed to be an improvement over sliding a few quarters into a slot on the meter?
Every time I picture this, it ends up evolving into transhuman Battlebots. Sure, when it first begins, you have guys replacing legs with carbon fiber prosthetics, but then someone goes and mounts a jet engine on their torso, or a long jumper with pneumatic springs for legs. In the fighting competitions, we'll first see guys with weighted hands for added power, but then we evolve that into implanting Wolverine claws and armor plating.
I was disappointed in how they handled the towel. I went with a few friends, and being the only person who had actually *read* the books, I had to explain the significance of the towels. Of all the Guide entries to leave out, why that one?
And yeah, Alan was absolutely *perfect* as Marvin.
It's been a while since I've used DC. Does it actually give you full *tracking* capabilities? I don't mean "Delivered at X:XX", but the full "Arrived at X", "Departed X", "Arrived at Y" in-transit tracking. That's what they were looking for on that MM shipment. I was always under the impression that DC only tells you when the package was delivered (I could be mistaken, of course).
On a side note, can DC be purchased at the kiosks when you are shipping media mail? The MM process is already convoluted when done at a kiosk (weigh the package, cancel, then purchase a stamp for the right amount from the main menu), and I've never checked if there's a way to purchase DC without going all the way through the "Mail a Package" sequence. I know I could get it from a live person, but the POs in my town are always insanely busy (I've never seen fewer than 20 people in line at any of the half-dozen I've gone to, no matter what time I go), so I try to do as much as possible at night at the kiosks.
I had a similar experience. I had the *hardest* time making the overpaid vegetable manning the phone at Paypal that Media Mail shipments can't be tracked.
The nail in the coffin for me, though, was another shipment. About a month after shipping, the package shows up at my place with "Return to Sender" stamped on it. I email the buyer, no response. After another dozen emails over 2-3 weeks, I finally get a response. She "changed her mind" after I shipped it. I then find out that she has filed an Unauthorized Charge claim with her CC company for this purchase (instead of just *asking* me to refund it). At Paypal's request, I send the email off to their people.
Now, bear in mind, I have her admitting in writing that she *did* purchase this, even though she's claiming it is an unauthorized charge. Of course, this ain't my first rodeo, I know full well the seller almost always loses these battles. Sure enough, I lose. I'm stuck eating all the fees and shipping costs. It wasn't a huge amount, but it's the principle here.
Yeah, I got screwed by Paypal, and I wasn't happy about having to continue using them. Fortunately, Ebay has done a truly impressive job of screwing the sellers, so I've moved almost all of my inventory to Amazon. The fixed shipping takes some getting used to ($3.99 shipping credit for a book doesn't even come close when you deal in textbooks), but overall I find Amazon to be *much* better to deal with than Ebay/Paypal when it comes to returns, refunds, etc.
It really all depends on what you are testing, and your setup.
If you're running a bare-metal VM, fine. But if you're installing the beta in something like VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, etc, you can run into issues. If you're looking at hardware, graphics performance, etc, the use of craptastic VM drivers in place of your real hardware renders any testing worthless. The potential lack of working guest tools can further complicate tests.
My VirtualBox VM at home has a handful of VMs (XP, SuSE, Debian, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD), but for anything but the most basic of beta tests, I'd rather slap it on one of my spare drives and add an entry to GRUB. VMs are great, but testing inside one adds an unwanted layer of complexity that can affect the reliability of your tests.
There's no need to get fancy with your names. Anything beyond an ID tag will be outdated in no time. Users change, machines move between buildings/rooms, services change, etc.
We just use the simple company-id# for all workstations. When we opened another office in a different city, we tagged all of those as city-id# to distinguish. Wasn't necessary, but we wanted to be able to spot those at a glance.
In the end, you should have an Asset Management solution in place that will track all the extra cruft. Building/Room #, assigned user, warranty, purchase date, services running, etc. No need to stick all that in the name.
Now, for my sandbox network that gets wiped often to test new tech configurations, all machines are named after rain deities. We don't track those in the EAM suite, and they wipe so often that names don't even matter.
But in that case, wouldn't they theoretically have backups?
Unless the IT staff maintaining these machines are also corrupt, they should have sealed and validated backups stored offsite that the judges wouldn't be able to access without leaving a trail of evidence.
This just sounds like more of the usual "I'm the fucking pope now!" Sheriff Arpaio BS (pardon the Robin Williams reference).
Let's say you insist on everything being done in-house. What happens in the following scenario (happened to me earlier this week):
It's 3:00 AM, and I get alerted because a few services on the backup server crashed, killing the nightly backup in mid-write.
Now, if I can restart the services remotely, it is a simple fix. But if I have to drive to your office, wait for you to show up (so you can watch me click the "Restart Services" icon), and head back home, do you know what that's gonna cost? I, and any IT firm worth their salt, will demand double or triple time for off-hours callouts, and probably a minimum callout as well, if I live more than 30 minutes away). You've just paid me an entire day's pay to drive in and click one button.
Remote administration is a legit and extremely common practice for small businesses. As long as you pick a reputable company, your IT guys are no more dangerous than the rest of your employees.
Little background: I work for an engineering firm that contracts with defense industry firms. I split my time between working remotely and working in-house. Even in-house, no one looks over my shoulder (hell, I hold the *only* key to the server room, aside from the master building key). I wouldn't trust you (and likely would refuse the contract) if you made such demands. Makes me wonder what you're hiding. Ultra-paranoid bosses are not conducive to an effective working environment.
The reality is, there's not a lot of incentive for me to steal your IP, unless you have something your competitors would pay me enough for to retire for life (ie, 7 figures minimum). The business world is small, if I get caught doing something stupid, I've screwed myself for decades and completely ruined my chances of working anywhere in the same industry. Well, unless I'm a CEO, in which case I'd get 30 job offers within a week of getting out of jail =)
Truth is, even with you looking over my shoulder, I could *still* do nefarious things. I'm a command line guy, and most servers can be managed from a console, so unless you've memorized all the cryptic switches for all the servers you run, I can do almost anything and you wouldn't even know anything is amiss.
Unless you can monitor my activities 24/7 by someone who knows what I'm doing, I can design a script at home and execute it right in front of your eyes with a carefully written shell command. You'd see me do it, and wouldn't even know it until I was long gone.
In Summary, yes, you are being paranoid. If you're a company with *very* valuable IP, you can't trust *anyone*. But then, if you were one of those companies, you wouldn't be outsourcing your IT in the first place.
When I took Differential Equations in college (2005), I paid about $150 for my textbook (brand new edition, so no used copy to be found). Two years later, I found a copy of this textbook from 1974 at a garage sale for $1. Since I had my shiny new copy still, I bought the old one to do a comparison.
Sure enough, other than a few small changes (slight changes to the end-of-chapter questions), probably 99% of the text was completely unchanged, other than a few typos being fixed.
My favorite professors were the ones who said "f*** the books". My Psych 101 prof actually wrote his own book that the bookstore printed up for $25. When I took Physical Geography, my professor went a step further. He took all the Powerpoint slides, replaced key words with blanks, and took the lot to Kinkos. $20 a pop for 400 pages of Powerpoint slides instead of paying $140 for the textbook.
Science texts are the worst. I had some expensive engineering courses ($300-ish for books), but my roommate had by far the worst I've ever seen. His O-Chem class cost him almost $800.
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I realize this is a troll, and I shouldn't bother responding, but....
This is a common misinterpretation. I'm not saying I like *hanging around with kids*. I'm saying I like a lot of the same things as I did when I was a kid.
Personally, I don't particularly like being around kids (I neither have, nor want, children). but when I am around them, they tend to like me because I can still act like a kid, instead of being just another boring adult who completely ignores them.
I'm the type that goes out to a state park and spends half a day following birds around to see what kind of material they're making nests out of. It has nothing to do with children, other than it being the same curiosity about the world that I had as a child, the thing that so many people lose as they grow up.
As far as pretending, it helps. When I've been troubleshooting a SQL Server issue for three days, spending an hour daydreaming about something else helps me approach the problem from a fresh perspective.
Yeah, it's not a secret that child abuse is typically a family affair, but telling parents that their brother or cousin might be touching little Suzie in a bad place doesn't sell news stories. Creepy looking men driving around in vans does.
Little kids like me, mainly because I have a similar sense of curiosity. I'll happily spend an afternoon watching bugs, or pretending to fight monsters in the backyard. Imagination is a wonderful tool for boosting creativity. But unless the parents really trust you (family, long-time friends, close neighbors, etc) you have to act like a boring adult to avoid being seen as a perv. No smiling, acknowledge them and then ignore them, just like mommy and daddy do.
If you find a lost child, the only way to help without getting a nightstick in a bad place from a rent-a-cop is to (a) don't get within arm's reach and (b) immediately dump the kid off with the first *female* you can find. Screw finding an employee, you're better off finding some random lady and telling her "this little boy can't find his mommy". Any attempt at help beyond that will end badly.
I suspect it is a mix. A slightly different example:
Roaches. You always see the stereotype of the woman freaking out. Well, I live in Florida. Palmetto bugs are a way of life down here. I don't care if you're in a $50 million mansion, you're gonna see palmetto bugs at some point. And they run/fly *straight* at you (tall and thin person == tree == shelter in their eyes).
Down here, people don't really freak out. I know people who will run screaming from a bee, but show them a roach and they calmly pick up a newspaper and crush it.
I don't think we're hardwired for these kinds of fear. My suspicion is that it results either from some trauma early in life (little kid gets bitten by a spider), or the result of being "taught" to fear it by your parents ("Don't touch that, it will make you sick").
Okay, not all people using laptops in class are assholes.
I've had professors that would cover 100+ slides in a 50 minute class. I can't write fast enough to keep up, but I *can* type fast enough. I sat in the back so I didn't disturb anyone.
With a netbook, the noise is minimal. The keys are usually pretty quiet, and there is no fan noise.
I do recall one asshole, though. He sat two rows ahead of me, and had a laptop. He used to watch porn in class. I don't remember a single lecture =)
UCF (Univ. Central Florida) kinda supported Linux. I could use wifi access, see and print to network printers, etc. The caveat is that they don't "officially" support it, so I was on my own when it came to troubleshooting any problems. Overall, it wasn't bad, I didn't hit any major snags. The techs were a mixed bag. A few knew Linux pretty well, but there were quite a few "Hey, what OS is that?" questions when they'd see my XFCE desktop.
Web courses, however, were a nightmare. The "enterprise"-level app (which had to have been written in someone's basement) was heavily optimized for IE6/7, and it was damn near unusable in any other browser. Switching between pages in Firefox would occasionally throw a "You are already logged in" error, forcing me to close the browser and clear the session cookie to get back in. The file upload utility only worked half the time, the other half the file would upload straight to a black hole (my teachers didn't buy the "A black hole ate my homework" excuse until I showed them exactly what happens). Eventually I got tired of it and tossed an XP guest in VirtualBox on my laptop.
Doesn't surprise me too much. I'd never used a serial port (I'm 25) until my current job as a network admin and had to deal with some Sun servers with no vid cards (and a stuffed switch that wouldn't accept connections through the web console).
Hell, between the 6 machines in my home office and the 5 in my work office (not counting all the gear in the server room, of course), there is not a *single* serial port to be found. Unless you're managing "real" servers or networking gear, serial ports are seldom seen anymore.
True story:
When I was in high school (graduated '02), I took a whole slew of AP courses. Now, the AP exams to determine college credit were taken about a month before the year ended.
After the AP exams, teaching *stopped*. My AP Physics teacher brought in an N64 and we spent the rest of the semester playing Super Smash Brothers. My AP English 2 teacher spent the last month grading freshman papers (and reading aloud the really awful ones) while we sat around playing poker (he even joined us a few times). AP Comp Sci? We played UT on a server we'd secretly installed on one of the research lab machines (I happened to know that one of the domain admin passwords was 030997, so we could do pretty much anything we wanted).
I only had one AP class that did anything after the AP exam (AP Calc), and that just consisted of a review of the material already taught.
Once they did what was required for us to take the AP exam, there was no incentive to go any further.
If you read my initial post, you'll find that I NEVER claimed it wasn't normal or typical. All I said is that apologies are *social*, not *natural* in their origin (as you initially claimed).
I made NO statements about whether or not they are okay, appropriate or acceptable.
See, the thing you don't understand here, is that I *don't* say "I'm sorry" in that case. I've been to plenty of funerals, but never ONCE have I apologized to the widow/widower.
My natural reaction is to ASK how the person is handling it. "Are you alright?" "How are you holding up?", etc. I can comprehend the emotion, and I am concerned for how the person is doing, but I do NOT feel any compulsion to APOLOGIZE.
You can show empathy WITHOUT apologizing.
Do you understand that one can exhibit, understand and be empathetic without resorting to an apology? That perhaps there are OTHER ways of showing support?
I think times have changed in this regard.
I did some volunteer work at a county library years ago, and they had the capability to track user history (full checkout history spanning several years).
When I was in college, my uni had records of everything I checked out. I found this out when I couldn't remember the name of a book I'd checked out 4 years earlier, and the circ lady pulled up my history to get the name. I saw the screen, which had full details on everything (book, checkout/return dates, etc).
Sorry, but apologizing is about #10 on my list of priorities in your scenario. My first response is likely to be "Are you okay", followed by "How the hell did I survive a tidal wave from an asteroid impact by holding onto a wet railing?"
Concern for the welfare of your group is natural (survival). Apologizing for something that you had nothing to do with is a SOCIAL construct. You are *taught* that you should apologize, it is not ingrained in your base nature.
First, a brief trick from my school days. We had a professor who didn't even look at the source. He'd come by, you'd "run" the app, and he'd look at the output. I'd forgotten about an assignment, so right before class I ran the calculation we were supposed to be "solving" on my calculator, hard-coded a cout in the app to print the answer, and stuck a pause in there to make it look like it is working. One of only three people who passed the assignment.
------------
Now the real one:
This one happened the night before I was supposed to deliver a milestone build. Short development time, lots of work, we've all had 'em.
So I'm working on a function that is taking all of the inputs and generating a list of all combinations. I haven't slept in about 2 days, I'm wired on caffeine. The code I end up with (quickest to write) looks like this:
*Note, these are just placeholder variable names, the real source code used descriptive names, used the values to pull data out of classes, etc*
x = [1,2,3,4,5]
y1 = [8,9,0]
y2 = ['a', 'b', 'c']
y3 = ['w', 'x', 'y', 'z']
x = [[e, f, g, h] for e in x for f in y1 for g in y2 for h in y3]
Keep in mind that in the actual function, it would have gone up to y11, with all 11 being parsed in that one list comprehension.
It works great, very fast, but it is *completely* unreadable. The code is still there (with about a page worth of comments). That one line convinced me to never consume seven 2-liters of Mountain Dew in a day and try to program. I don't drink soda/tea/coffee very often. Hell, I probably could have written something better DRUNK.
Just my own experience, but I've never seen differences in battery life that are this extreme. Linux has always been worse, but never more than about 10% on the laptops I've used, with one exception.
The only time I've seen a huge difference is on an HP laptop that I currently use as an SVN/Trac/CUPS server. The machine has a BIOS bug that prevents me from using ACPI in Linux, and HP never released a patch to fix it. The only way to keep the machine stable in Linux is to boot "acpi=off, noapic, nolapic". With no real power management, it drains mighty fast, even with all the hardware that gets disabled booting this way (webcam, wireless, etc).
On the other hand, a few years ago I owned a wonderful Sager laptop. With two double capacity batteries and a regular capacity battery, I could get a full 20 hours of battery life from the three (8 hours for double, 4 for regular) running Linux (Gentoo at the time), which was within 1 hour of the average total when I ran XP.
Linux does have worse battery life, for a number of reasons, but the difference doesn't seem significant on most hardware. It all seems to depend on hardware quirks in your machine.
Last time I was out at the beach, I found a similar system had replaced our trusty meters in the public parking lots. The process for parking went something like this:
(1) Park
(2) Walk to one of the pay stations
(3) Insert credit card
(4) Walk to another pay station after realizing the card reader is busted
(5) Realize I don't know my space number
(6) Cancel purchase and walk back to my car
(7) Discover that the space number is printed on the ground underneath my car (kudos to the genius who came up with that)
(8) Find an empty space halfway across the lot and count backward to my car
(9) Go back to the second pay station, and wait in line behind the 6 people who magically arrived between steps 5 and 8
(10) Insert card, wait, enter space number, wait, select time, wait for ticket to print.
(11) Walk back to my car again (always on the far end of the lot from the one working pay station)
(12) Put the ticket on the dash of my car
(13) Walk to the beach, passing by the pay station I was just at
They take forever, are more prone to breaking (a meter breaks, one spot is affected...a pay station breaks, the whole lot is affected), and provide ample opportunities to screw up the purchase.
This is supposed to be an improvement over sliding a few quarters into a slot on the meter?
Every time I picture this, it ends up evolving into transhuman Battlebots. Sure, when it first begins, you have guys replacing legs with carbon fiber prosthetics, but then someone goes and mounts a jet engine on their torso, or a long jumper with pneumatic springs for legs. In the fighting competitions, we'll first see guys with weighted hands for added power, but then we evolve that into implanting Wolverine claws and armor plating.
Not that I'm saying I wouldn't watch =)
I was disappointed in how they handled the towel. I went with a few friends, and being the only person who had actually *read* the books, I had to explain the significance of the towels. Of all the Guide entries to leave out, why that one?
And yeah, Alan was absolutely *perfect* as Marvin.
It's been a while since I've used DC. Does it actually give you full *tracking* capabilities? I don't mean "Delivered at X:XX", but the full "Arrived at X", "Departed X", "Arrived at Y" in-transit tracking. That's what they were looking for on that MM shipment. I was always under the impression that DC only tells you when the package was delivered (I could be mistaken, of course).
On a side note, can DC be purchased at the kiosks when you are shipping media mail? The MM process is already convoluted when done at a kiosk (weigh the package, cancel, then purchase a stamp for the right amount from the main menu), and I've never checked if there's a way to purchase DC without going all the way through the "Mail a Package" sequence. I know I could get it from a live person, but the POs in my town are always insanely busy (I've never seen fewer than 20 people in line at any of the half-dozen I've gone to, no matter what time I go), so I try to do as much as possible at night at the kiosks.
I had a similar experience. I had the *hardest* time making the overpaid vegetable manning the phone at Paypal that Media Mail shipments can't be tracked.
The nail in the coffin for me, though, was another shipment. About a month after shipping, the package shows up at my place with "Return to Sender" stamped on it. I email the buyer, no response. After another dozen emails over 2-3 weeks, I finally get a response. She "changed her mind" after I shipped it. I then find out that she has filed an Unauthorized Charge claim with her CC company for this purchase (instead of just *asking* me to refund it). At Paypal's request, I send the email off to their people.
Now, bear in mind, I have her admitting in writing that she *did* purchase this, even though she's claiming it is an unauthorized charge. Of course, this ain't my first rodeo, I know full well the seller almost always loses these battles. Sure enough, I lose. I'm stuck eating all the fees and shipping costs. It wasn't a huge amount, but it's the principle here.
Yeah, I got screwed by Paypal, and I wasn't happy about having to continue using them. Fortunately, Ebay has done a truly impressive job of screwing the sellers, so I've moved almost all of my inventory to Amazon. The fixed shipping takes some getting used to ($3.99 shipping credit for a book doesn't even come close when you deal in textbooks), but overall I find Amazon to be *much* better to deal with than Ebay/Paypal when it comes to returns, refunds, etc.
It really all depends on what you are testing, and your setup.
If you're running a bare-metal VM, fine. But if you're installing the beta in something like VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, etc, you can run into issues. If you're looking at hardware, graphics performance, etc, the use of craptastic VM drivers in place of your real hardware renders any testing worthless. The potential lack of working guest tools can further complicate tests.
My VirtualBox VM at home has a handful of VMs (XP, SuSE, Debian, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD), but for anything but the most basic of beta tests, I'd rather slap it on one of my spare drives and add an entry to GRUB. VMs are great, but testing inside one adds an unwanted layer of complexity that can affect the reliability of your tests.
There's no need to get fancy with your names. Anything beyond an ID tag will be outdated in no time. Users change, machines move between buildings/rooms, services change, etc.
We just use the simple company-id# for all workstations. When we opened another office in a different city, we tagged all of those as city-id# to distinguish. Wasn't necessary, but we wanted to be able to spot those at a glance.
In the end, you should have an Asset Management solution in place that will track all the extra cruft. Building/Room #, assigned user, warranty, purchase date, services running, etc. No need to stick all that in the name.
Now, for my sandbox network that gets wiped often to test new tech configurations, all machines are named after rain deities. We don't track those in the EAM suite, and they wipe so often that names don't even matter.
But in that case, wouldn't they theoretically have backups?
Unless the IT staff maintaining these machines are also corrupt, they should have sealed and validated backups stored offsite that the judges wouldn't be able to access without leaving a trail of evidence.
This just sounds like more of the usual "I'm the fucking pope now!" Sheriff Arpaio BS (pardon the Robin Williams reference).
One note for the original poster.
Let's say you insist on everything being done in-house. What happens in the following scenario (happened to me earlier this week):
It's 3:00 AM, and I get alerted because a few services on the backup server crashed, killing the nightly backup in mid-write.
Now, if I can restart the services remotely, it is a simple fix. But if I have to drive to your office, wait for you to show up (so you can watch me click the "Restart Services" icon), and head back home, do you know what that's gonna cost? I, and any IT firm worth their salt, will demand double or triple time for off-hours callouts, and probably a minimum callout as well, if I live more than 30 minutes away). You've just paid me an entire day's pay to drive in and click one button.
Remote administration is a legit and extremely common practice for small businesses. As long as you pick a reputable company, your IT guys are no more dangerous than the rest of your employees.
Little background: I work for an engineering firm that contracts with defense industry firms. I split my time between working remotely and working in-house. Even in-house, no one looks over my shoulder (hell, I hold the *only* key to the server room, aside from the master building key). I wouldn't trust you (and likely would refuse the contract) if you made such demands. Makes me wonder what you're hiding. Ultra-paranoid bosses are not conducive to an effective working environment.
The reality is, there's not a lot of incentive for me to steal your IP, unless you have something your competitors would pay me enough for to retire for life (ie, 7 figures minimum). The business world is small, if I get caught doing something stupid, I've screwed myself for decades and completely ruined my chances of working anywhere in the same industry. Well, unless I'm a CEO, in which case I'd get 30 job offers within a week of getting out of jail =)
Truth is, even with you looking over my shoulder, I could *still* do nefarious things. I'm a command line guy, and most servers can be managed from a console, so unless you've memorized all the cryptic switches for all the servers you run, I can do almost anything and you wouldn't even know anything is amiss.
Unless you can monitor my activities 24/7 by someone who knows what I'm doing, I can design a script at home and execute it right in front of your eyes with a carefully written shell command. You'd see me do it, and wouldn't even know it until I was long gone.
In Summary, yes, you are being paranoid. If you're a company with *very* valuable IP, you can't trust *anyone*. But then, if you were one of those companies, you wouldn't be outsourcing your IT in the first place.
When I took Differential Equations in college (2005), I paid about $150 for my textbook (brand new edition, so no used copy to be found). Two years later, I found a copy of this textbook from 1974 at a garage sale for $1. Since I had my shiny new copy still, I bought the old one to do a comparison.
Sure enough, other than a few small changes (slight changes to the end-of-chapter questions), probably 99% of the text was completely unchanged, other than a few typos being fixed.
My favorite professors were the ones who said "f*** the books". My Psych 101 prof actually wrote his own book that the bookstore printed up for $25. When I took Physical Geography, my professor went a step further. He took all the Powerpoint slides, replaced key words with blanks, and took the lot to Kinkos. $20 a pop for 400 pages of Powerpoint slides instead of paying $140 for the textbook.
Science texts are the worst. I had some expensive engineering courses ($300-ish for books), but my roommate had by far the worst I've ever seen. His O-Chem class cost him almost $800.